June 28, 2012 - Péter Faragó

Did you know that the global market volume for outsourced translation services reaches USD 33 billion this year? A huge sum, which also proves that machine translation expands the demand for human translation.

If you have ever tried to translate more than one word by machines accessible on the Internet, you’ll see the reason of this boom. Translation machines – especially the free ones – cannot correctly render more complex texts from one language to another. If you want your input to appear in another language authentically, you’ll need flesh and blood translators, who – by the way – may use machine translation for their work.

Globalization and the Internet boom in emerging and developing countries has created an unprecedented need for translation. According to forecasts, the job market of translators and interpreters will grow by 42 percent from 2010 to 2020, which is at least four times higher than the average global growth in jobs. More and more enterprises realize that translation may be a pathway to more revenue and new markets. Besides, governmental and non-profit organizations have also become keen on translation, partly as a result of the expansion of the huge communities as the European Union. An EU-member government should have websites available in at least two or three European languages.

With a demand so huge, many translators and translation agencies are struggling with an immense workload. Every step towards higher efficiency could become more than handy. Let me give two tips concerning these issues.

There are quite a few side effects of the process of translating various texts and these can be humps on the back of language professionals. One common difficulty occurs when translating websites: costly working hours are wasted on grabbing the content from the source website, and – after the translation is done – formatting the text and feeding it back to the site. I’m convinced no language professional is keen on performing these puny, but lengthy tasks themselves. With view to this, we have developed a tool that does all these “chores” automatically, leaving more time and energy to authentic translation work.

Another usual dilemma is how to organize the translation of bulky texts within a very limited period of time. Of course, you have to allocate the job to more professionals. But dividing and channeling pieces of texts to an array of translators can also be a tough job, as well. No wonder crowdsourced translation has become so popular. We also have an application that allows customers to easily distribute huge contents to a desired number of language professionals in a swift and organized way.

By the way, crowdsourced translation often happens spontaneously. Sometimes, customers and fans of products or services begin creating their own translations and posting them in various forums. And a lot of companies immerse in this process, encouraging voluntary translators to come up with more and more sophisticated texts or to choose the best version for a given foreign phrase.

June 26, 2012 - Balázs Benedek

If only we could post in Chinese! According to a recent study, the same text can be up to 70 percent shorter in Chinese than in English. That is, we could share three to four times more info within – say – a Twitter post with you. Chinese is thus ideal for micro-blogging, as these texts tend to have a maximum expanse of 140 symbols.

But don’t worry: we will not switch over to Chinese immediately, as we don’t speak this very particular language on a professional level. In Hungary, where Skawa originates from, there is even a saying “this is Chinese to me”, which means exactly the same as the English proverb “it’s Greek to me”.

June 11, 2012 - Balázs Benedek

Almost five thousand miles (eight thousand kilometres): that’s how much business travel we have had in the recent few weeks in connection with Skawa. No matter how tiresome this period was, it was worth the effort: we gained a lot of encouragement and experiences.First in the line was The Next Web in Amsterdam, a huge conference on the future of web business, where start-ups like us also had a chance to present their products, developments. A global conference of a booming sector as The Next Web was, the vast hall that used to be the headquarters of a gasworks was overcrowded. This was good news for us as we could meet lots of inquirers, potential clients and investors.Thanks to our success at the How-to-Web conference, we also had an exhibitor’s desk where we presented our most recent development, the website translation tool Easyling. We prepared a small add-on to the product: typing in the website address, Easyling immediately provides clients with an offer. This raised the attention of visitors, so now is the time to hope that there were many investors amongst the bunch of people who visited our desk. Also start-up peers were interested in this low-cost solution for makingtheir websites multilingual.We also experienced a great failure, though: we couldn’t once get a hit at the game which could best be labelled “Where will the cow shit?”. Anyway, we compensated with a brief photo session at the premises.

A few days later, we were already dazzled by the sunshine in Madrid, heading for the European Language Industry Association’s gathering Networking Days. As can be guessed from the organizer’s name, this conference focused on the translation business, which was a golden opportunity for us to promote Easyling.

We are happy that the mainstream feedback we received from this rather professional public was that Easyling filled a niche on the market. There are no easy-to-use and reliable technical solutions for website translation. As a result, we were asked to keep quite a few webinars about the operation of Easyling in the following weeks. And we hope will we pick up the thread from here at ELIA’s next Networking Days in Budapest, at October 4 to 6.

Balázs Benedek, Easyling’s co-founder and CTO

Hungarian Kilgray’s international conference, MemoQFest in Budapest represented a rather similar atmosphere as the Networking Days. Here, we once again had to opportunity to present our results at an exhibitor’s desk, which earned us a trip to London to meet a leading British translation office.
(See more images at facebook.com/easyling )

With these unique experiences, we very much agree with Delicious-developer Chad Hurley, who – in his presentation at The Next Web – claimed: “it is the journey that matters, not the arrival”. Looking back to the past weeks and forward to the upcoming months, we are certain:our journey is just about to begin!

November 10, 2011 - Balázs Benedek

The first, but definitely not the last triumph of Easyling ticked off. As a proud father, I’m thrilled to announce that Easyling, our cloud-based website translation proxy solution won first prize at Start-up Challenge “How to Web 2011”, the biggest web conference of Central and Eastern Europe. Yesterday, we presented our latest business solution to 750 experts attending the finals of the competition. I have to confess: we are totally blown away by the victory. There were hundreds of submissions, and Easyling surpassed even the ten finalists that got an opportunity to present their ideas to an expert jury of How to Web.

I was happy to receive all the positive comments by all those guys from cutting edge ITC-companies, investors, analysts, specialists, industry leaders. Even without this victory, How to Web would have been a buzz, but now, we are having the time of our lives. And we are overexcited by what the future might hold: by winning this first prize, we have earned tickets and a startup booth at The Next Web conference in April 2012.

By the way, did you know that US$ 2.6 billion were spent globally on website translations in 2010? And the term ‘website translation’ is searched 673,000 times every month; add to this the searches for the term ‘website translator’ and the number grows to more than one million.

Well, with these figures at sight, what else can I say:
make way for Easyling.com!

November 1, 2011 - Balázs Benedek

Here we are, with all sorts of information, stories, recent news and future plans related to solutions and services of Skawa Innovation.

If you are already familiar with one or more of our products or activities, you can find interesting insider stories on our work and ideas. If you are new to Skawa, this is the place where you can get to know us easily: not only will you find answers to your questions on our activities, but also you can get to know the everyday life, the past and the envisioned future of Skawa Innovation.

Starting a start-up is one of the most exciting professional experiences. We are here to share with you these experiences, with consideration to specific local issues. Skawa is based in Central Europe, a region of fast-paced changes in every sense of the word, a region considered the second most innovative one in web and mobile-based solutions after California’s Silicon Valley.

If you are an existing or potential business partner, an IT-geek with interest in IT and web development, a start-up fan, or a peer from the region – you might find some interesting content here.

Welcome to the world of Skawa Innovation. It’s high time to follow us.
Péter Faragó and Balázs Benedek,
Founders of Skawa Innovation Ltd.